Gran Turismo 7 Planned for 2015 or 2016

Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of the long-running Gran Turismo racing franchise, revealed a possible 2015-2016 timeframe for the next series entry, saying PlayStation 4 hardware will make the development process much less painful than the last installment.

“Everything will be running naturally,” Yamauchi told Games TM. “PS3 was much, much more difficult. The high quality of data that we have being rendered on the PS4 I think is going to make an incredible difference.”

In IGN's Gran Turismo 6 review, we praised its abundance of content and tight controls; but the lackluster sound design, which downgraded muscle engines to a mere buzz, and the inconsequential results of otherwise life-threatening mistakes, held the game back from being one of the best in the series.

Yamauchi said he and the team at Polyphony are aware of what they couldn't accomplish in their last attempt, and that the next installment will be on pace with modern game design.

“For GT7, myself and my staff have a clear vision: to do everything we couldn’t do in GT6,” he said. “We want to make it very Gran Turismo. By that I mean it’s going to be a game that matches the very era that we live in, in 2015 or 2016.”

Mike Mahardy is a freelance journalist writing for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter at @mmahardy.